Harper's Nixon moment

Well played, you baby-noshing election-stealing dead-eyed bastard, well played indeed.

I'm sometimes accused of being cynical about politics or seeing conspiracies where none exist and, up to a point, I will admit this is sometimes true. It is an occupational hazard for journalists and politics watchers. Sometime rather than reacting to the crisis or issue or outrage du jour, I like to take a broader view and look at how various events and actions interrelate and examine things on a purely tactical level.
And from a purely tactical point of view, I have to hand it to Stephen Harper and his communications brain trust this week for this.

PM: Duty of Canadians to remember Shafias

Harper has 'no plans' to discuss death penalty

By Giuseppe Valiante ,QMI Agency

MONTREAL - Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced funding for an education campaign against so-called honour killings on Friday but dismissed the idea of hanging honour killers.
Harper said the federal government will give $348,150 to the Shield of Athena Family Service, a Montreal-based women's organization.
Announcing the funding in Montreal is symbolic: The city was home to Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya and son Hamed, who earlier this year were sentenced to life in prison for the 2009 drowning of sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, as well as Mohammad Shafia's other wife, Rona Amir.

From a tactical point of view, this was a brilliant move. The government has been taking it on the chin over their voter suppression efforts and their usual rote repetition of "the Liberals did it first/too," "Scandal? What scandal?" and "We didn't do anything, nobody saw us and besides you can't prove anything" doesn't seem to be getting much traction, Michael Sona is refusing to stay under the bus and more dots are being connected and more damning information keeps coming out.
Harper and his  inner circles of advisors seem to realize they have tripped over their collective dicks and no amount of Dean Del Mastro haplessly obfuscating on Power and Politics is going to unfuck that particular goat.

In addition, the effort to appease their social conservative base via Kitchener MP Stephen Woodworth's attempt to reopen the abortion debate without reopening the abortion debate is going over about as well as a fart in church. The pro-forced birth "abortion is the same as murdering babies" crowd don't want to pussyfoot around the topic and are getting annoyed that the CPC isn't delivering on what they want. A sizable majority of women (and the men who love them) - even those who don't think of themselves as feminists - already stirred up by the Rush Limbaugh "slut-gate" episode down south, have been treating Woodworth's whole premise as the pile of crap it is and are pulling no punches, taking to social media in droves to vent their outrage.
The knuckledragger base are tired of high-fiving over getting rid of the long-gun registry and the Shafia conviction and want fresh red meat. Even conservative loyalists are having a hard time defending the government on the voter suppression issue. When the CPC loses the sensible media conservatives like Andrew Coyne, you know the ship is taking on water.
And on Thursday, the government had to admit that maybe, just maybe, they might have made an error in committing to the F-35 since it is going to cost twice what they said it would if it ever gets airborne in the first place.

Clearly, action was needed, a distraction had to be found.

And so Stephen Harper emerged on Friday with a tactically perfect speech.
It lets the knuckledraggers and Good Germans in the base get back into a lather about evil swarthy Muslim foreigners and crime. It lets the PM flex his "tough on crime" muscles. It lets Harper pose as a defender of oppressed women. He even managed to throw in the "of course we wouldn't dream of reopening the debate on capital punishment" bit of nudge-nudge-wink-wink.
Since he has delegated the public spinning and partisan House of Commons hackery in defense of voter suppression and election cheating to Del Mastro, giving this speech also allows Harper to try and show how Prime Ministerial and dignified he is, rising above partisanship and striding the high moral ground.

And woe betide any nay sayers - if you accuse the PM of simply trying to distract attention from the voter suppression scandal, you are comparing murdered young women to 'shiny objects' and are clearly a monster who hates women and loves terrorists, criminals and isn't a serious person concerned about a serious issue like philosopher-saint-poet-warrior-and-defender-of-civilization Stephen Harper.

Only a terrible, awful mean-spirited person like a Liberal would be so cynical as to think this speech was anything but the proud, brave wonderful Stephen Harper talking seriously about a serious issue of grave seriousness that is a terrible, terrible problem in her majesty's dominion. St. Stephen the Wise and Powerful would never ever politicize the deaths of these young women, that's the kind of thing horrible leftists would do.
If you commies can't even admit that honor killings are a terrible problem in Canada then you probably hate justice almost as much as you hate the troops, babies and kittens. Shame on you all and no, the Prime Minister will not be taking questions or reopening the debate on capital punishment, we are too busy not reopening the debate on abortion right now.

Nope, from a tactical point of view, that speech was brilliant and bulletproof.

With the voter suppression scandal snowballing, and curtain being pulled back on the CPC's fraud and sabotage, some are saying that this is Harper's Watergate. Some are comparing him to Richard Nixon. They are not wrong. I won't be surprised if a secret CPC memo (or clandestine tape recording) surfaces one day referring to the four Shafia women collectively as "Checkers."

Because to Stephen Harper  and the CPC brain trust politics is war by other means and winning is all that matters. This is all just tactics.
In the long run, they know that the so-called robo-call scandal will eventually play out to their benefit as long as they can make sure the mud gets sprayed around on their opponents, too. The more people who throw their hands up and turn their backs on politics in disgust, the better the CPC likes it. Now they don't even have to call them to tell them where their polling station has been shifted, because they don't want any part of voting anymore. As long as there is a solid, unstable mass of  hardcore knuckledraggers who will come to the polls for when the conservative throw them  a few hateful bones, Harper and his happy band of fascist wannabes are delighted if they can turn everyone else off of politics.
Morality, ethics, and respect for the dead? A sense of shame? Respect for democracy and the rule of law? Those are for losers, you silly dirty hippie. 

But then, I'm sometimes accused of being cynical.


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Harper's the One

What the hell are those things on the side of Dean Del Mastro's head? They can't be ears, because he clearly isn't listening to a word that is being said to him. Del Mastro is probably sitting down in the video linked above because he has been spinning so much lately, he is too dizzy to stand up. What a maroon.

As Stephen Lautens pointed out on Twitter the other day, the Tory have a sort of standard response anytime they get their tails caught in a crack. I've amended his list slightly:

1. It's a smear
2. It's not worthy of a reply
3. It's a rogue
4. But...But...ADSCAM!
5. Look over there! A shiny object!
6. The Liberals did it/the Liberals did it first
7. But the NDP are SOSHILUSTS! OMG!
8. Sure it happened, but REAL Canadians don't care about all this insider political stuff, just ask Don Cherry
9. Prove it, copper!
10. Everyone does it
11. Plead guilty and pay a fine

Let me be perfectly clear, and I'll use small words so people like Del Mastro can understand.   There is nothing wrong with using robocalls to ask for support for your party, whether the calls come from Canada, the United States or Timbuckfreakingtu.
The only time the point of origin becomes an issue is when the calls contain illegal content, because if the company making the calls is outside the country, it is more difficult to compel them to provide information to investigators.

Calling voters and claiming to be from Elections Canada or claiming to be calling on behalf of a party other than the one paying you, is ILLEGAL.
Lying to voters with the intention of preventing them from voting is ILLEGAL.

With the vast number of ridings now reporting illegal calls intended to suppress the vote, it is becoming clear that it this could only have been put together by someone with access to significant amounts of both money and data. It is also pretty clear that the vast majority of the illegal calls across the country were made to try to suppress the votes of identified Liberal supporters, with NDP supporters being a secondary target. The fact that a handful of identified CPC supporters now claim to have received such calls is irrelevant. Why are they only coming forward now? Why are there so few of them and so many complaints from Liberal and NDP supporters?

In investigating a crime, one looks at who had means and motive. The Conservative Party of Canada has a massive database of voter information going back several elections. Their people regularly brag about it. They have shown, at the highest levels of the party, their willingness to break election law in the past. They had the means and the motive. It is simply a matter of finding the fingerprints on the knife sticking out of the back of democracy at this point.

Do not be misled or confused by the ink the CPC is spraying like a frightened octopus. Do not let them sidetrack you with arguments about whether Elections Canada has received 31,000 complaints or 31,000 contacts or 30,999. Do not be misled or confused by the endless speculating on who 'Pierre Poutine' is or might be. He will be found eventually. There is a going to be a paper trail of some kind. The people directly involved in the illegal calls in Guelph and other Kitchener area ridings will eventually be identified.
In looking at the local players in CPC politics and the history of ratfucking among a few of these Segeretti wannabes, I have my suspicions about who might have been involved. And no, I'm not going to name any names so the aforementioned ratfuckers can stop dialling their lawyers for now.
Do not be misled when the culprits are finally identified and the Prime Minister and his inner circle of advisors and cabinet colleagues all disavow any knowledge. That is how espionage works  -- when you or members of your team are captured - the secretary will deny any knowledge etc etc. This was not done by a few rogue operatives, working on their own without supervision of any kind. There will be an apparent organizational firewall of plausible deniability. Some of the people at the sharp end of things may even be prosecuted.
But do not for one instant think that the final responsibility for this does not lie with Stephen Harper. He is the King Ratfucker.
This is his crime in the same way that Watergate was Nixon's crime.
At worst, he personally ordered it done and chose the people who executed the plan. At the very least, he fostered an attitude within the party that winning - by any means necessary - was all that mattered, chose the managers of the people who committed these crimes and completely and utterly failed to exercise any oversight, supervision or leadership.
In the end, it doesn't really matter where Harper's actions or lack of them fall on that scale. He is the leader and a leader is responsible for the actions of the people he leads.
If he had a right or honourable bone in his body, he'd admit that and resign immediately.
But what do we get?
Stephen Harper first claiming the Liberals did it and finally, if not in so many words, saying "Prove it, copper!"




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the buck stops where?

Illustration stolen from Alison at Creekside, an excellent place to start learning about Robocon or Suppressiongate or whatever we are calling the latest bit of epic malfeasance on the part of the Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada

The conduct of Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada is now being described as Nixonian in some quarters and I would find it hard to disagree. They have certainly copied from the Nixon playbook in that they like to claim to represent the 'Silent Majority' and accuse their opponents of being elitists and radicals. They are profoundly anti-intellectual, to the extent that they mistrust science. They are hawkish on foreign policy and love to tout their support for the military.

But most of all, Harper will deny, deny, deny and throw on advisor after another under the bus. Nothing will ever be his fault and he will never acknowledge any error, any awareness of wrongdoing and will never admit to anything, no matter what the evidence.

It kind of reminds me of this song from the Watergate era.




I am willing to take Stephen Harper at his word that he knew nothing about the fraudulent phone campaign that helped him win a majority. But if he didn't know about that one, what else didn't he know?

No one voted for his advisors or campaign staff. He picked them himself, or picked the people who appointed them. He chose the people who decided that it was okay to for the CPC to lie, cheat and steal their way into power and he is the one who must take responsibility.
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Trash talking us into war

I think most reasonable people, at least in hindsight, would agree that one of the things the Liberals' got right under Chretien and Martin was keeping Canada out of the gigantic deadly goat rodeo known as the Iraq War.
Remember how in the months that lead up to the invasion we were told again and again that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction, that there was no question he was working on 'nookyalur' weapons, that Saddam Hussein was seen french kissing Osama Bin Laden under the bleachers during the homecoming game. This was all given as gospel truth by the White House, Pentagon, CIA and about 90% of the Western Media.
And yet, hundreds of billions of dollars and a million or so deaths later, we know it was all bullshit. They were wrong or lying or both.
Iraq was about as close to having nukes or a means to deliver them as say, Guatemala is and was about as much a military threat to its neighbours at that point as Belgium is to France, Germany and Britain.
Outside of a very few conservative true believers and George W. Bush's inner circle, no one, least of all the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, think the invasion of Iraq worked out well.
Remember too, that Stephen Harper very much wanted Canada to take part in the Iraq War.
Now that Harper has his majority, he cannot and will not be denied his opportunity to show the world that Canada is a major player on the world stage just as capable of killing lots of non-Western Nogoodniks and Nogoodnik women and terrorist children as any other NATO member and not just some namby-pambly peacekeeper. Truly, lives could be saved if someone would just give the man a ruler, tell him the centimetres are really inches and send him off to measure his little Cheney.
Even though the current U.S. president is likely to be reelected without having start a war with Iran, Harper, ever hopeful of a victory for his Republican fellow travellers, is already laying the groundwork to take Canada into the next war of choice.

  “I’ve raised the alarm as much as I can, but obviously I don’t advocate particular actions publicly. I work with our allies to see if we get consensus on actions,” he said.
Mr. Harper said he has no doubt that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. “There is absolutely no doubt they are lying,” Mr. Harper said, referring to statements by Iran that the nuclear program is for peaceful uses.
“The evidence is just growing overwhelming. This is not, as was the case of Iraq, merely the opinion of allies,” he said.
The development of nuclear weapons as one of the purposes of Iran’s nuclear program “is just beyond dispute at this point,” he said. “The only dispute is how far advanced it is and how far off it will be until they actually develop those weapons and develop the capability of delivering the weapons.” 

Given that Israeli and U.S. conservative hawks have been warnings Iran is just x-number of years/months/weeks/days/hours away from "getting the bomb" roughly every two weeks since the Shah was chased out of Tehran, I tend to take such certainty with a bushel or two of salt.
Given the number of sabres being rattled at it, Iran would be wise to follow North Korea's example and actually get hold of some nukes. Saddam Hussein didn't and look what happened to him.
Mind you, it isn't just that Harper want to get his war on for its own sake, he also thinks he sees a way to turn a dollar or three for his oil-patch pals:

Also during the interview, Mr. Harper linked the debate over the controversial Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to Texas with concern over Iran’s threat to blockade the main shipping route for oil in the Middle East. “It’s pretty obvious what the right decision is … not just from an economic and environmental standpoint, but from an energy security standpoint,” Mr. Harper said. “When you look at the Iranians threatening to block the Strait of Hormuz, I think that just illustrates how critical it is that supply for the United States be North American,” Mr. Harper said.

The winning quote from the interview though, by far was this bit of classic right wing projection. The same comment could have come from any leader in the Middle East, Asia, Eastern Europe, South America or Africa in discussing the United States and conservative Canada.

“In my judgment, these are people who have a particular, you know, fanatically religious worldview, and their statements imply to me no hesitation of using nuclear weapons if they see them achieving their religious or political purposes,” 

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Another day, another trial balloon

Fresh from launching a trial balloon on reopening the abortion debate that he swears he has no interest in reopening (mainly because it is too handy a chunk of raw meat to dangle in front of the base at fundraising time) Steven Harper sends his legal beagles forth to reopen the debate over same sex marriage that he swears he has no interest in reopening. Amid the screeching, outrage in response to their clumsy er, backdoor effort to test the waters the Justice Minister is backpeddling at light speed.
The whole foray was ill advised to start with and as transparent a bit of wind testing as has ever been seen.
The lawyers for the feds, who would not be responding to this case in the way they did without checking with the boss first, argued neither woman was legally able to marry a person of the same sex under the laws of Florida or the United Kingdom, where they reside. "As a result, their marriage is not legally valid under Canadian law."
The whole thing could have and should have been avoided by citing the fact that Ontario divorce law has a residency requirement. That makes some sense, since if you don't live here, things like orders to divide property or share custody become much more difficult for Canadian courts to enforce.But no, Harper decided this would be a good time to mess around and provoke a freakout, thus giving him a chance to a) burnish his "see, I'm not really a bigot" credentials by tut-tutting about this "misunderstanding" b) blame the Liberals for not creating perfect legislation (that his party opposed) and c)reopen the legislation to 'fix' it.
These trial balloons, along with the earlier push to villify the CBC, are great tools for Harper because they allow him to rile up the base and squeeze them for cash to fight "those lousy socialists and liberals who are obstructing the grand conservative agenda to remake Canada" and lay the groundwork for changing things without having to do any actual remaking until he's damn good and ready to do it.
Well played, you baby-noshing, dead-eyed low-rent Machiavelli


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Bisy Backson

Having upped stakes and relocated the pulpit--if not yet the entire family--to the Royal City and having started a new job as a night watchman at a place that makes a heckuva buggy whip, I've been too busy to write anything here even when I've had an Internet connection, but that doesn't mean I haven't been paying attention.

Poor, poor Lady Barbarella -- c'est tres triste, non?

Yes, as a matter of fact I am gloating, just like every other evil liberal journalist in the country, if not the English-speaking world. Maybe that makes me a bad person, but I think I can live with it. 
I will say this:

• Nice to see the universe shitting on the right people for a change
• "Her hair uncharacteristically dishevelled, Amiel stumbled on her snakeskin pumps as she was taken away." is my new favorite poem. The use of "snakeskin pump" in this context is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. It approaches haiku. 
• "model prisoner" indeed

Such schadenfreude-laden fripperies aside, I have little to say. Canadian politics? Well, as much as the recent election was entertaining in a "wow, that mushroom cloud sure is pretty"-"We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when" kind of way, with a Harper majority, the NDP have become the political equivalent of the Toronto Maple Leafs Stanley Cup Parade Planning Committee. My approach at this low ebb is that of Mr. Elvis Costello.



More when I have time, reason, and something more constructive to say than


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the King's speech

Let us be clear, Stephen Harper is the front runner in this election. The last thing a front runner wants is to lose control of the agenda or to get put on the defensive or to make a gaffe. So the smart thing for him to do has been to carefully control his public appearances to avoid any unfortunate incidents where he is forced to answer tough questions. Hence the Potemkin rallies with carefully vetted crowds. Hence the "only five questions a day" refusal to speak with reporters. But with the number of scandals continuing to mount - former aide Bruce Carson illegally lobbying to score some cash for his escort girlfriend, the return of the Helena Guerges circus, Bev Oda's Not-gate and now Dimitri Soudas being found out as an influence peddler - Stephen Harper's silence was finally starting to become an issue.
Canadians, the Conservative focus groups undoubted discovered, were starting to balk at the idea that we should give Stephen Harper a political blank cheque without him making some effort to explain why he deserves it.
So last night Stephen Harper finally deigned to speak to the Canadian people via an interview with Peter Mansbridge - an interview very carefully stagemanaged to try to make him look like a regular guy. He stands in a hockey rink in Newfoundland in his quilted Canada jacket, tieless, doing his best to look like a minor hockey coach instead of someone who has never really had a job outside of politics. (A hockey rink? My first thought was that the Globe and Mail's  John Doyle is righter than he knows: Harper doesn't just keep his hair in the fridge, the CPC keeps him in cold storage at all times!)
The interview itself is telling - if you read between the lines and look at the way Harper answers or doesn't answer the questions. He goes out of his way to try to look like a reasonable guy who is beset by unreasonable opponents who are conspiring (coalition!) in diabolical ways to seize power for their own sinister ends (tax increases! Separatists in power! reopening the constitution!). To someone looking at Canadian politics for the first time, someone who has no idea of his track record, he might even pull it off.
But notice how many times Mansbridge, who is hardly a confrontational interviewer, calls bullshit on Slick Stevie. Notice how often Harper says something about his opponents and Mansbridge responds with "but that isn't what they've said."
Notice how Harper refuses, several times, to admit that any form of coalition is valid and that the party with the most seats doesn't necessarily get to govern if they can't win the confidence of the House of Commons. He keeps trying to argue that it is somehow a vague and nebulous notion that constitutional scholars disagree about and that "regular Canadians" would never accept.
It isn't. They don't. We have. Stephen Harper is just plain lying.
He tries to make it sound as if his government was brought down over the budget. It wasn't.
He tries to make it sound like he doesn't know why we are having an election, when he pretty much engineered it through his own brinksmanship on parliamentary privledge. He gave the opposition the choice of either letting him walk all over the notion of the government being accountable to the House of Commons or forcing an election while they trailed him by enough in the polls that he might get a majority.
And thanks to a divided oppostion, he very well might get his majority. Notice how he doesn't really say why he needs a majority other than to talk about "stability" and "unnecessary elections"-odd given that he has forced the last two. Notice also that he won't really say what he will do with a majority that he hasn't been able to do with a minority.
At the end of the interview Mansbridge asks: "Why should Canadians trust you with their vote on May 2?"
Harper replies,  "I say look at our record, look at the direction the country is going. What other country would you want to be living in right now?"
I agree. Look at his record. Look at the direction the country is going. Ask yourself what other country Stephen Harper would rather be living in right now.
Me, I'd rather be living in a country where the government doesn't fire the head of the nuclear regulatory agency for doing her job. I'd rather be living in a country that is willing to investigate credible accusation of complicity with torture. I'd rather be living in a country where the prime minister doesn't suspend parliament every time he gets his tail caught in a crack. I'd rather be living in a country that spends a billion dollars on helping the poor instead of dispensing political pork and encouraging police thuggery as part of an international dog-and-pony show. I'd rather be living in a country where the government wasn't providing instruction manuals to its members on how to disrupt parliamentary committees.
I'd rather live in a country where decisions are based on solid census data and scientific fact, not one where we spend a fortune building new prisons for criminals who don't exist outside of the imagination of fearmongering politicians.
 I'd like to live in the tolerant, economic and socially progressive Canada I grew up in, not in a country run by a control-freak micromanager hell-bent on turning it into a laboratory for Randites, frat boys, authoritarians, religious zealots and ignorant yahoos.

I'd like to think that is what most Canadians want and why Stephen Harper won't get his majority.
I'd like to think that, but then Willy Loman posted this video and reminded me why our country is in trouble to begin with.

Lennon circa 1965 would have dropped him like a bad habit

Seriously, I hope John Lennon's ghost lays a first-class haunting on Stephen Harper.

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I can't keep giving these ideas away for free

Or should I assume that my campaign consultant fee is in the mail? See end of third bullet point. What took you so long?

I'll try to find better pictures later, but for now, via @ShirleeEngle


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Irony is not only dead, but its corpse had been desecrated

The young girl has a lovely voice, yes, but seeing Stephen Harper sing this song is like watching David Duke sing "We Shall Overcome." Someone who was disappointed we didn't get to play in the Iraq sandbox and is destroying our fiscal security to buy unnecessary stealth fighter jets should not be singing peace anthems. It is not merely distasteful,  it is hour-long-shower-scrub-with-a-wire-brush disgusting. Maybe this is his energy plan, to hook John Lennon's coffin up to a turbine and provide free electricity to the entire American continent from the resultant spinning.

He says he has his own lyrics for the song - I'll bet. Something along the lines of "Imagine there's no Liberals..." no doubt.

Personally, I'd have thought he'd be more into a different Lennon tune from a year or two earlier, though again he'd have his own lyrics... "You say you want a coalition..." or perhaps "Can't buy me Love."

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You say impeachment, I say contempt of Parliament

Let's call the whole thing off!

Apparently there are those who interpret Parliamentary law as saying that Stephen Harper is now barred from holding office due to having been found in contempt of Parliament. I'm not sure this is the case since the confidence vote was held before acceptance of the committee report finding the government in contempt could be voted on by the House of Commons. Still, a such a finding even at the committee level is significant. Certainly, the report would have been confirmed by the House, although I suspect the Conservative-dominated Senate would have sent it back to the house.
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Blame Ignatieff!

We take you now live to the United Nations for a Press Conference with Stephen Harper, his hand puppet foreign minister  Laurence Cannon, spokesman Dimitri Soudas and various other members of the government


(with only a small apology to Matt Stone and Trey Parker)


Stephen Harper: Times have changed
Our kids are getting worse
They won't obey their parents
They just want to fart and curse!
Dimitri Soudas: Should we blame the government?
Laurence Cannon: Or blame society?
John Baird: Or should we blame the images on TV?
Harper: No, blame Canada Ignatieff!
CPC caucus: Blame Canada Ignatieff!
Harper: With his beady little eyes
And pointy head so full of lies
Caucus: Blame Ignatieff!
Blame Ignatieff!
Harper: We need to form a full assault
Caucus: It's Ignatieff's fault!
Baird: Don't blame me
I beg you pleasethey don't think that we're all goonsThey just love the Portugese!
Harper: And the President once
Had my picture on his shelf
But this new guy, he tells me to fuck myself!
Cannon: Well, blame Ignatieff
Caucus: Blame Canada
Harper: It seems that everything's gone wrong
Since Ignatieff came along
Caucus: Blame Ignatieff
Blame Ignatieff
Soudas: He's not even a real Canadian anyway
Peter McKay: I could've been a doctor or a lawyer rich and true,
Instead my reps burned up like a piggy on the barbecue
Caucus: Should we blame the matches?
Should we blame the fire?
Or universal health care, which we hope will soon expire?
Harper: heck no!
Caucus: Blame Ignatieff
Blame Ignatieff
Harper: With all his summer barbecues
Baird: And the elitists love him too
Caucus: Blame Ignatieff
Shame on Ignatieff
For...
The coalition we must stop
The left we must bash
The Liberals and the NDP
and anyone else that we can seeWe must blame them and cause a fuss
Before somebody thinks of blaming uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuus!!!!




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A message from the top

Video by Pale over at ACR with some assistance from fellow Galloping Beaver inkstained wretch Alison of Creekside. Needless to say, I won't be quitting the day job I'm looking for to become a professional voice actor anytime soon.

The party of fiscal responsibility --seriously?

A fake lake? Yeah, because that is so much cheaper than just bussing the press to Huntsville and giving the business to local lodges.

Questions are a burden to others, answers are a burden to oneself.

For years, we've known that Stephen Harper is a control freak who insists that every utterance of everyone speaking for the government be vetted through the PMO, but methinks he has now gone a bit too far. 
 First, it was gagging backbenchers so that the ignorant, knuckledragging rednecks let's be kind and say the "less sophisticated, less media-savy" among his Reform Alliance colleagues didn't start ranting about racial minorities and commies under the bed "get off message" and embarass  the "New Government of Canada." Then, after he realized he a had a few of these loose cannons in the Cabinet, ministers were told to zip it, that anything that had to be said would be said by the PMO. After all the press were hostile and prone to asking "gotcha" questions and-- let's face it-- your average Parliament Hill journalist engaging a Reform-Tory Cabinet Minister in a battle of wits is pretty much attacking an unarmed target.
Having shut out the press to the degree possible, Harper then decided that even Parliamentary committees should be served a nice big mug of STFU, and the party put out a manual for Conservative members that explained how to block committee business, even completely shut things down by being obstructionist arseholes if things weren't going their way. When that didn't work well enough to keep 
a committee from demanding information about the way Afghan detainees were being dealt with and whether Canadian troops could face accusations of war crimes for the negligent way their superiors had decided to organize things, Harper shut down Parliament and hoped the whole thing would blow over.
It didn't.
Next he tried the classic American conservative argument -- that everything was a matter of national security and  tippy-top secret to protect our wonderful troops and if you wanted to violate that sacred trust and find out what the elected government had ordered the troops to do on the nation's behalf,  well clearly you were a troop-hating pinko bastard who hated freedom -- Wolverines!!!
Then the Speaker of the House stuck a pin in that particular trial balloon.
Now, Harper has decided that ministerial aides and other senior staff answer to no one but the PMO and the Minister and couldn't possibly be called upon to answer questions by Parliamentary committees. The spin he is trying to put on this is both hilarious and ironically true. The justification for this notion that just because they draw a government salary, civil servants shouldn't ever have to explain their actions to Parliament is that the Ministers are ultimately responsible for what is done in their ministry. This is true -- and just you wait and see how responsible some of these schmucks are going to be held if their underlings are ever made to testify under oath about the crap that goes on at the behest of their bosses.

So if Dmitiri Soudas is able enough to command a handsome taxpayer-funded salary as the director of communications for the Prime Minister of Canada, he can damn well answer a few questions about his job from the House of Commons Ethics Committee. Parliament is supreme and if it summons him, he better show up, otherwise he will be guilty of Contempt of Parliament. And if Michael Ignatieff , Gilles Duceppe and Jack Layton won't  go to the mat on this, then they won't go to the mat on anything and we might just as well let Harper appoint himself dictator-for-life and be done with it.

Also, what Dave said -- that goes double for me.

Why have a Parliament anyways?

Roy MacGregor, while largely acknowledging that Stephen Harper seem to have little but contempt for Parliament, insists that no one but Parliament Hill reporters and opposition MPs much cares about prorogation, which is hard to pronounce and just plain boooooring. Few people care about what Parliament does at the best of times, opines MacGregor, Canadians have "tuned out."

Gee, Roy, should we even bother with having a Parliament? Tell us, is it good for anything?

"What, one panel asked the other night, if there was "a national emergency"? Well, depending on what that may entail - a big snowfall in Toronto? Denmark invading Hans Island? - presumably they would get back to work and do whatever might be necessary.
An argument can be made, on the other hand, that this country runs quite smoothly when Parliament is not in session. Rare indeed is the Canadian political crisis that comes along in summer or over the long Christmas break - or, for that matter, during prorogations.
It can even be suggested that the country runs best under a prime minister who treats it as a part-time job."

"A national emergency in Canada? That's unpossible!"

Yeah, forget that Canada has almost 9% unemployment, that the economy is in dire shape, that we are mired in a pointless war halfway around the world with no end in sight or that the government ordered our military to hand over prisoners to be beaten and tortured - especially that last part. No one cares but a bunch reporters and nerds on the internet!

Besides, burning stick soon come!

MacGregor should stick to what he's good at-- writing about hockey--and leave the political commentary to people that understand that democracy is not a just a minor inconvenience that takes up valuable space in the newspaper that could be used for sports stories.

going prorogue

Sweet pirouetting ghost of Pierre Elliot Trudeau, I take a few days off to go soak in a hot spring and you people let that baby-eating fathead decide parliamentary democracy is a mere inconvenience he'd rather just do without? "L'etat c'est moi," eh Steverino? I'm with Alison, what Rick said, that goes double for me. You don't suppose Mercer would like to take over Ignatieff's job, do you?

thanks to Pale over at A Creative Revolution for the spiffy graphic

Wake up call on climate policy or Obama-crush?

Would it be wrong to speculate that this:

Harper to attend Copenhagen after all
Decision follows announcement that U.S. President Obama would visit city that's playing host to climate summit
John Ibbitson
Ottawa — From Friday's Globe and Mail Published on Thursday, Nov. 26, 2009 8:27PM EST Last updated on Thursday, Nov. 26, 2009 9:57PM EST
With the Chinese and the Americans leaving him no choice, Stephen Harper reversed himself Thursday and announced he would, after all, attend next month's meetings on climate change in Copenhagen.
Reporters frantically phoned and texted the news from the Prime Minister's aircraft as it taxied for takeoff en route to a Commonwealth heads-of-government meeting in Trinidad, reflecting the reluctant, impromptu nature of the decision.

has something to do with this?

Scientists target Canada over climate change
Damian Carrington
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 November 2009 22.54 GMT
Prominent campaigners, politicians and scientists have called for Canada to be suspended from the Commonwealth over its climate change policies.
The coalition's demand came before this weekend's Commonwealth heads of government summit in Trinidad and Tobago, at which global warming will top the agenda, and next month's UN climate conference in Copenhagen. Despite criticism of Canada's environmental policies, the prime minister, Stephen Harper, is to attend the Copenhagen summit. His spokesman said today: "We will be attending the Copenhagen meeting … a critical mass of world leaders will be attending."
Canada's per capita greenhouse gas emissions are among the world's highest and it will not meet the cut required under the Kyoto protocol: by 2007 its emissions were 34% above its reduction target. It is exploiting its vast tar sands reserves to produce oil, a process said to cause at least three times the emissions of conventional oil extraction.

Our own little Nixon

Lots of fuss in the blogosphere about Steverino's big singing debut. Pale makes some nice points with a pop-up version of the video here.
Last year, big gala's were "elitist" and Steverino was hot and heavy to chop all the arts funding he could get away with. Now, he's appearing on stage with Yo Yo Ma at the National Arts Centre Gala? Well, his wife is the honorary chair of the event, so I suppose it makes some sense, but just to be clear about his feelings for the arts, Steve left the building before the event was over and went tieless to the blacktie event. When was the last time you saw him without a yoke of the corporate oppressor necktie?

Oh yeah, now I remember...



And how did that work out for ya Steverino?

This whole thing is just another sweater vest moment and it won’t work any better than it worked for Nixon. The people who like Harper are the same people who liked or would have liked Nixon and they like him for the same reasons – because he’s mediocre, just like them. They hate anyone smarter, better educated, better looking or more talented than they are and so they loved Nixon because, just like them, he wasn’t comfortable in his own skin and lacked any social graces at all. (See Rick Perlstein's Nixonland for myriad examples of Nixon being Nixon - Steverino is Nixon writ small)
They don’t like anyone different from themselves and they don’t like new ideas or change.
Read any posting on any Blogging Tories blog - its all about the resenting anyone different, anyone that they think is getting something that they aren't getting. And that, and fear of The Other, is what conservatives have been running on for the last 50 years.

That’s why they like guys like Steve. But you have to ask why they feel they need to sell this idea that he’s human. Why are they trying so hard to convince us that he’s a regular guy?
If he was a great piano player or singer, his advisers never would have let him do this--he'd look like an elitist, a star. Since he's merely adequate, he looks like a "regular guy" instead of the awkward, narcassistic, power-hungry, control freak that he is.


When I saw Harper at the piano keyboard, I immediately thought of Nixon, but Red Tory beat me to posting the video



Plus ca change, plus ca meme frickin' chose

Dept of "I'm not saying he is, I'm just saying" --Could it be that Harper is actually an android fuelled by the succulent flesh of tiny babies? Why doesn’t Stephen Harper, if that is his real name, level with Canadians and deny his baby-eating and the accusations that he’s really an android?

Only 95 shopping days left!

At last, my worries about what to buy Stephen Harper for Christmas are over! I've finally found the perfect gift - it's something he can use, and you know he wouldn't buy one for himself.


a tip of the Fez to The General.